With recent improvements in touchscreen technology, electronic devices that receive user inputs via user interfaces on touchscreens have come into widespread use. Furthermore, in games that are executed on electronic devices, user input via touchscreens provided on electronic devices is coming into widespread use as an alternative to conventional user input using physical controllers.
In particular, compact portable electronic devices, such as smartphones, are rapidly coming into common use, and many games that are executed on such portable electronic devices are also being released. In view of this situation, various technologies related to methods of operating an object (e.g., a player character) displayed on a touchscreen have been proposed. For example, Patent Literature 1 describes that when a touchscreen is touched, a virtual controller is displayed at the touched position. Furthermore, Patent Literature 2 describes that an operation reference position of a touchscreen is defined on the basis of a detected touched position, an operation instruction is generated in accordance with the direction from the operation reference position to the latest touched position, and the operation reference position is moved so as to be closer to the latest touched position when the latest touched position is moved.